Electric utilities (“utilities”) worldwide are restructuring and moving toward a competitive environment where accurate information about distribution system performance is required to ensure that capital expenditures and maintenance dollars are spent appropriately to provide safe, reliable and cost effective power to the customers. To measure distribution system reliability performance, the electric utility industry has developed several reliability performance measures. Three of the most commonly used reliability indices/metrics include measures of outage duration (SAIDI System Average Interruption Duration Index), frequency of outages (SAIFI System Average Interruption Frequency Index), and restoration time (CAIDI Customer Average Interruption Duration Index).
Electric distribution reliability benchmarking is completed annually in North America (Canada and United States) by the IEEE Distribution Reliability Working Group (DRWG), consisting of more than 100 plus utility volunteer participants, and the NRECA (National Rural Electric Cooperative Association) Reliability Benchmarking Group (RBG), comprising more than 200 plus volunteer distribution cooperatives. Utility benchmarking members ranges from small distribution systems serving a few thousand customers to several million customers. As a result of the diversity in the type of utilities involved (2000 plus distribution utilities exist in the U.S.), numerous challenges in standardization and consistency issues arise due to the differences in each utility's data collection methods, reliability metrics (SAIDI, SAIFI and CAIDI) calculation methodologies, major event day (MED) or exceptional event definitions, sustain (long) and momentary (short) outage definitions, and other fundamental parameters.
Traditionally, IEEE DRWG collects summary aggregated confidential daily outage data and calculates reliability metrics by using the IEEE 1366 (Guide for Electric Distribution Reliability Indices) methodology to statistically determine the MEDs or exceptional events. In parallel, the NRECA RBG collects higher level and detailed confidential individual outage information per event including pertinent information such as outage cause, feeder/circuit, substation, voltage level, equipment failure and more. Consequently, as more utilities join the benchmarking group and detailed outage data are collected, the labor processing time to complete the tedious data acquisition from various utilities, analysis, and final benchmarking reports results in excess of several months. In addition, the traditional OMS (Outage Management System) that utilities use to track outages only provides limited data analytics and reporting capabilities. Thus, utilities spend a substantial amount of time exporting data from their OMS, creating customized outage technical reports via Microsoft Excel, Access or other programming tools, and maintaining the data integration between the customized tool and the OMS. Such traditional procedures are slow, cumbersome, labor intensive and expensive.
Therefore, a need exists for an improved system with innovative methods for automating and standardizing the data acquisition, aggregation, analytics, data requirements, and benchmarking reports in a fast, scalable and cost-effective manner. A further needs exists for methods for integrating the utility outage analytics and benchmarking solution in real-time and in the cloud/web to solve the standardization of calculation methodology for reliability metrics, data inconsistency, deficiency in data analytics and technical reports, and time consuming benchmarking process.